That changed in the last decade, among other things the population is dissatisfied with immigration.
I cannot tell you if that is justified, but I can say from personal experience that in some cases the praised Dutch directness turned to racism.
Things like, people not believing that you have a phd, or refusing to take your credit card because the color of skin does not match the ethnicity of the name.
> but I can say from personal experience that in some cases the praised Dutch directness turned to racism
It always was a thin line. What has changed is that victims are now speaking up, and a silent majority realizing that brutish-directness always was a subgenre that somehow kept being taken as representative of directness.
One can be direct and courteous (and not racist), but the Netherlands (as in Holland) isn't the best place to find that.
The Netherlands has a higher population density than the US (520 people per square km vs 37) and lower GDP per capita ($62k vs $82k), so I'm not sure if that framing is exactly useful. In absolute numbers, yes, there's fewer people, but they're packed into a very small area so you have to be smart about how you do that.
When it comes to resources Norway and the Netherlands are radically different. But it's in how the resources were used not in whether they existed. The Dutch had a lot of North Sea gas but they, like the UK, squandered the income from it. Norway was lucky to avoid what has become known as the Dutch disease partly because Norway was later to the party.
